He's big. He's bad. He takes no prisoners. And depending on where you fish, he could be your best buddy.

He's the alligator gar.

The floodwaters of 2011 along the Mississippi River have long receded, but one of the effects still lingers. With the water came silver carp.

Sometimes referred to as "flying carp', this invasive species showed up in large numbers in many flooded lakes and it causes numerous problems.

The most obvious is their tendency to fly out of the water when approached by boats. More than one angler has suffered bruises after being hit by one.

Another potential problem could be worse. Silver carp are filter feeders and consume plankton, which is also a food source for game species in the early stages of life. Because of the number of silver carp and the amount they consume, biologists are concerned they will out-compete Mississippi's native game fish.

In 2012, biologists at the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks decided to see if one of our native fish could help curb the increasing population of these invaders and Bee Lake became a Petri dish for an experiment.

"We needed to get something in there to see if we could introduce a predator that would control the silver carp," Fisheries Bureau Director Larry Pugh said."Gator gar eat a lot and they grow really fast.

"You're talking about a really large predator - top of the food chain kind of thing."

With the ability to grow to weights in excess of 300 pounds, about 440 gator gar were introduced to Bee Lake in 2012. Each had a tag attached near the dorsal fin. The tags were put in place to protect the fish and it is illegal to harvest alligator gar at Bee Lake, tagged or not.

"We took a lot of grief for that," Pugh said. "Some people thought there were too many already."

Pugh explained that while there were other species of gar such as spotted and longnose, there was no real presence of the larger alligator gar in Bee Lake. The other, smaller species were being mistakenly identified by anglers as alligator gar.

Since then, Bee Lake has enjoyed a decline in silver carp numbers, but so have some other lakes along the Mississippi River. That makes determining the success or failure of the project difficult.

"We've seen fewer silver carp," Pugh said. "Can we attribute that to the alligator gar? We don't know."

The department is continuing to monitor their experiment and asks fishers who catch alligator gar in Bee Lake to record the weight, length and tag number, then release the fish alive. Data should be reported by calling (601) 432-2400.

To contact Brian Broom, call (601) 961-7225 or follow The Clarion-Ledger Outdoors on Facebook or @BrianBroom on Twitter.